Trentonian editorial: Bad-news party

The political equivalent of the Bad News Bears, the GOP, is getting an overload of advice on what it must do to improve its standing and avoid going the way of the hoop skirt and buggy. In fact, though, there are some ominous realities that won’t be easily overcome, regardless of how earnest Republican efforts are to do so.

Apart from the reality that many are reliant on government programs (especially Social Security and Medicare) and don’t trust the GOP anywhere near the social-safety net, there’s this: Democrats have a mighty standing army in the form of federal, state, county, municipal, public school and public university payrolls. They’re keyed into politics and ready to march come election time. Their unions rank among the top campaign contributors, ahead of many of the corporate fat-cat interests.

And then this: The public-sector army is bolstered by brigades of activists and consultants, ranging from Planned Parenthood to the Sierra Club, who are plugged into government and have a greater vested interest in seeing government flourish than in seeing it restrained. These folks too are Ready Reserves prepared to spring into action for Democrats — as are, of course, the ever-dependable news media. Private-sector schleppers, meanwhile, are not keyed into politics and are not easily called up for Republican duty. They’re distracted by their private lives and toils.

And all of this is not even to mention the GOP’s highly problematical image as an assemblage of the self-satisfied privileged and the off-putting pietistic.

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Footnotes

ASIAN THUMBS-DOWN— It’s been much noted that Republicans took it on the chin from the black and Latino vote. Less noted: The Asian vote went 73 percent President Obama vs. 62 percent in 2008. Another disquieting thought for Republicans to mull over: Asians aren’t advantaged by, say, government-run affirmative action efforts, To the contrary they’re often disadvanged when official quota schemes disregard them for college-entry slots. Furthermore, Asians are by tradition an ethnic group that embraces free-market hustling. Seemingly, in other words, they’re an ethnic group tailor-made for the GOP. Yet they too wanted no part of the GOP message.

VOTER REPRESSION? — The black turnout was down a million votes from 2008. Aha. The voter repression that civil rights leaders kept warning us about? Two other turnout numbers seem to cast doubt on the notion. WHITE turnout was down 8.3 million. And Latino turnout was UP 850,000.